Meet the Hirschs Part I

OK, so when we left off, I had just boarded a bus en route to Yokneam. Now, you might ask, what exactly is a Yokneam? Well, Yokneam is a small city of about 20,000 people (in Israel this qualifies you for city status) in Northern Israel, about 20 minutes away from Haifa. The city is very high-tech, very industrialized, and growing very quickly due to the numerous factories that have opened in the area over the past 10-15 years or so. More importantly to this story, Yokneam is St. Louis’s partnership city, the place I'll be living in from January-March, and the home of my adoptive family, the Hirschs. Immediately after our nighttime escapades in Jerusalem, we all boarded buses leaving Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and left to spend the Rosh Hashanah weekend with our new adoptive families. Here’s mine:

(Ofra, Efi, Michal and Yuval)

Upon arriving to the Yokneam bus station, I was picked up by Efi, my new “dad”. With him were the 3 ½ year old twins, Yuval (the boy) and Michal (the girl), who might be some of the cutest kids I’ve ever met. A short drive later, I arrived at the Hirsch’s home and met Ofra, my new “mom”. Now, to add in the final reason why the timing on the nighttime seminar was so bad (Sidebar: I bet the higher-ups at OTZMA are thrilled with my comments on this thing. I should emphasize here that the CONCEPT of the program was fantastic. Something got lost in translation. Consider it constructive feedback for next year.), I was meeting these people for the first time on almost no sleep. Good first impression, right? Luckily, Ofra and Efi understood my situation and were fine with me taking a short nap. After resting for a little, I spent the afternoon with the family learning a little more about them. Efi is a mechanical engineer who does the kind of work you can't talk about. I'm not kidding. He showed me the factory he works at, which is surrounded by a 10-feet concrete wall with barbed wire on the top and an armed guard at the gate. Not totally sure I even WANT to know what project he's working on! Ofra is a teacher at a local elementary school and is currently finishing up her Master's degree in administration. In fact, I may be wrong, but I might actually be volunteering there during Phase II. Ofra's 8 year old nephew also was spending the day with them, and he and the twins were fascinated by my iPod touch. I was also able to communicate with the family very easily, since Ofra and Efi both spoke excellent English. Pretty sure the twins were just confused about why I couldn't speak Hebrew though...

So that night, we drove to a nearby town called Carmiel to have Rosh Hashanah dinner with Efi's family. And I mean his entire family. Between his parents, brothers, sister, and various nephews and nieces, there were probably a good 10-15 people there. Luckily, once again, they all spoke various degrees of English. Now, that doesn't mean I didn't try to speak some Hebrew (I'm starting to make some good progress in ulpan), but I was able to talk to them and explain more what I was doing here, both in Israel and actually at their house. It was around this time I came to a realization that this wasn't Rosh Hashanah - this was Thanksgiving! Whole family gathered from all over, large meal, lots of schmoozing... yeah, this was strangely reminiscent of a certain Thursday in November. Oh, and everything you hear about Israelis having huge family meals? It's all true. There was fish (and fish heads...), soup (with soup almonds - yum!), chicken, veggies, etc. etc. etc.

(Before the food came out. This was pretty much the last time you could see table.)

Before the meal started, Efi's dad went around the table with blessings for everyone (not the baruch ata type, more like the Thanksgiving type), and thought out a blessing for me in English, basically thanking me and the rest of the OTZMAnikim for coming here to Israel and helping their country. Honestly, one of the nicer moments of the year so far, and Ofra was talking about it to everyone for the rest of the weekend. After dinner, everyone came out to the patio and sat around talking. It was mostly in Hebrew, but it was nice to just take everything in and see if I could pick up any words. (I got like 3.) Yuval and Michal stole the show, getting up in front of everyone, singing songs, and giving blessings to everyone.

(Tell me these aren't some of the cutest kids ever.)


(The Hirschs' made cupcakes with little flags for each person at dinner, and they made sure mine was in English!)

Finally, after a very long day (or two), we bid our goodbyes, boarded the car, and drove back to Yokneam for the night. And while there was still a very long weekend ahead of us, this post itself is getting quite long, so I'll have to give this a To Be Continued...

Some random thoughts (but not many, this is really getting long):

-Really, I just have one thought. To the kU football and basketball teams: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Love it.